The Geographer Drank His Globe Away

A young biologist, Viktor Sluzhkin, gets a job as a geography teacher at an ordinary Perm school because of money problems. He fights, but after that he becomes friends with the students; he clashes with the vice-principal, and he also leads a hike for ninth-graders—rafting down the river. He even drinks wine with friends, tries to get along with his wife, and runs a children’s kindergarten with a little daughter. He lives like all of us—simply lives… But this simple life, described so desperately, so poignantly, and so tenderly by Alexey Ivanov, turns into a story about everyone: about everyone who has ever gotten tangled up or lost in life, who has at least sometimes felt as endlessly lonely as Sluzhkin. About everyone, who—regardless of loneliness and with a bitter ache—has not lost the ability to feel and to love.